Gambling
Related Essays and Reports by Andrew W Scott

The
Long Run

August
1st 2008

Reprinted
courtesy Bluff Australasia and Andrew W Scott

It's with great pleasure that I put pen to paper (well,
fingers to keyboard) to write this first ever edition
of my regular column, The Long Run. My evolution from
a seventeen year-old sneaking into the casino on a
Saturday night to a globe-trotting high-stakes tournament
player and poker journalist and has been a strange
one to say the least, and the Bluff editors have suggested
I tell you a little about it, as a way of introducing
myself. So here goes.

It
all starts back in November 1986 when a very fresh-faced
young lad first walked into Wrest Point casino in
Hobart. They had one table of five-card stud back
then, but since all the players were more than twice
my age and really seemed to know what they were doing
I was quite intimidated by it. I played it once or
twice and lost $1,926, for me at the time a devastating
loss (all these years later, I still remember the
amount).

After
doing my balls for a few months on silly games like
two-up, I finally twigged that BlackJack was a game
that could be beaten. If only I knew how involved
with that game I would eventually become. I decided
to take a rest from playing and spent many months
analysing BlackJack on my computer, and finally worked
out how to beat the game. I didn't realise I had simply
re-invented basic strategy and card counting, systems
that had been developed in the 1960s. Naively, I imagined
I was the only person in the world privy to this special
knowledge. Even more naively, since I wasn't cheating
or breaking any rules, I figured there wasn't anything
the casino could do about it. I was very wrong on
both counts. I re-entered Wrest Point, armed with
the youthful exuberance and cockiness that only, well,
youth, can bring. Lo and behold, "the system" (as
I came to dub it) worked, and I steadily collected
Wrest Point's cash, in ever-increasing amounts as
I built my bankroll. I
remember one particular night in the really early
days. After my then-biggest win, I rolled around in
my bed throwing twenty of those old "Grey Nurse" hundred-dollar
notes up in the air. Little was I to know that eventually
that amount of money would become less than a single
bet.

Then
it happened, Wrest Point barred me on a number of
trumped-up charges, and frustrated my play by changing
the rules for me, while leaving the rules the same
for the other punters. I decided my best bet was to
take my business elsewhere, and eventually went through
all the casinos in Australia - but they all got to
know me through staff moving around the casinos and
information sharing by management. Eventually, in
1993, I decided to go public. I went on a string of
TV shows: A Current Affair, Today Tonight, The Midday
Show, Good Morning Australia to name a few. There
were newspaper and magazine articles. I launched BlackJack
Masters, a school teaching other people how to win
at BlackJack. All this publicity destroyed any chance
I had of playing anonymously in Australia's casinos,
but by then it was pretty much destroyed anyway.

BlackJack
Masters was a huge success. Suddenly I went from being
a lone BlackJack-playing maverick, to the mentor of
numerous successful high-stakes players roaming the
country. The school grew to the point that I taught
classes and seminars in cities all over the country.
At its peak, there were six people working at the
school. I even did some teaching in Asia and New Zealand.
Newspapers and TV shows began contacting me for comment
on gambling and casino related matters, and they still
do. I was invited to appear at the public hearings
of the landmark 1999 Government Inquiry into Australia's
Gambling Industries.

In
2006, after thirteen years of teaching BlackJack to
literally thousands of students, I decided it was
time for a new challenge in life. Back then I still
played BlackJack occasionally in more obscure places
around the world, but after twenty years of it the
necessarily clandestine nature of BlackJack was very
tiring to me. I needed something new. So I left BlackJack
Masters in the very capable hands of my friend Chris
Martin, and found a new challenge. Enter poker. I
had dabbled in poker in 2001 and 2002 at Crown, and
after proving to myself I could beat $4/$8 limit hold'em
(woohoo!), and playing a little pot-limit around tournament
times, I had decided the stakes weren't big enough
for me. But now, in 2006, the stakes were certainly
more than big enough on the tournament circuit. Poker
is a game that courts socialising, rather than BlackJack
which encourages you to operate in the shadows. So
I began playing the poker tournament circuit.

So
far I've played every APPT main event, three Aussie
Millions main events, the 2007 WSOP main event and
twenty events at this year's WSOP. High stakes poker
tournaments involve another great passion of mine,
travelling. I travel so much these days that I don't
really know where I live. As I write this article
I am sitting in a hotel room in Hong Kong, having
just arrived here after two months in the US for the
WSOP and a little holidaying. In four days I will
be in Sydney. A few days after that, I will be in
Melbourne for the Victorian Poker Championships at
Crown. A couple of weeks after that, it will be on
to Macau for the Asia Poker Tour and Asia Pacific
Poker Tour events there. And then Seoul, Auckland,
Manila and back to Sydney, and God knows where else
- all before Christmas. In these columns I'll be writing
about my travels and adventures on the high stakes
poker tournament trail - the places I go, the people
I meet, and hopefully - the tournaments I win! Well,
maybe not win, but hopefully at least cash in… Until
next time, always do what's best in the long run…
Andrew